Last night, Diplo posted the following message on his Twitter: "All day finishin up these @_m_i_a tracks... Its official.. This team is from the FUTURE!! - diplo rusko switch mia blaqstarr sleighbellz FTW"

And while we already knew most of those producers were getting in on M.I.A.'s forthcoming LP, the addition of Brooklyn noise-pop act Sleigh Bells is new. And it's official, according to Sleigh Bells' manager, who told The Village Voice that Sleigh Bells songwriter "Derek [Miller] did production work on the album." The duo's publicist confirmed it as well.

It seems like just yesterday we were watching M.I.A. watch Sleigh Bells perform at Brooklyn DIY haven Market Hotel during CMJ. How far they've come. If you want to see what all the Sleigh Bells fuss is about, try to check them out when they open for Yeasayer and Major Lazer in the coming months.

M.I.A.'s album is due out this summer.

After much speculation, Le Tigre are finally speaking about their collaboration with pop star extraordinaire Christina Aguilera. Though there's still a possibility that the "couple of songs" Le Tigre made with Xtina won't make the belter's forthcoming album-- dubbed Bionic and reportedly due in April-- Le Tigre member Johanna Fateman had lots of positive things to say about the unlikely pairing in a recent blog post. "For a feminist band obsessed with pop music, it was pretty much a dream come true," she wrote.

Apparently, Xtina wanted to work with the NYC feminist icons because their wiry 1999 post-punk banger "Deceptacon" is her "jam." (Amazing.) According to Fateman, the megawatt chameleon even used LT singer Kathleen Hanna's "secret signature vocal FX box" during their sessions, which went down last winter. Also: Aguilera apparently owns "a million great pens."

Commenting on the oddness of the team-up, Fateman wrote, "[we] found a ton of common ground in our aim to make upbeat danceable tracks celebrating female friendship, strength, and of course, PARTYING," and, "The songs have a lot of elements we're known for like a garage guitar sound, schoolyard chants, new wave-y synths, electro beats, and somehow it all sounds crazily right with Christina's unbelievable voice." We are convinced! Good lord are we convinced.

Le Tigre aren't the only P4k-friendly acts working with Aguilera on her new LP-- Goldfrapp, Ladytron, M.I.A., and Santigold have clocked in studio time...

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Diplo and Switch's globe-trotting dancehall party project Major Lazer is hitting the road this spring. The "Lazers Never Die" tour will travel from East Coast to West, from the Ultra Music Festival in Miami to Coachella in California, from the end of March through mid-April. Rusko, a new signing to Diplo's Mad Decent label who produced the new M.I.A. track "Space Odyssey", will open.

Dates below:

03-27 Miami, FL - Ultra Music Festival *
03-28 Atlanta, GA - Masquerade *
03-30 Carrboro, NC - Cat's Cradle *
03-31 Baltimore, MD - Bourbon St. *
04-02 Philadelphia, Pa - Starlight Ballroom *
04-03 New York, NY - Terminal 5 *
04-04 Cambridge, MA - The Middle East *
04-06 Columbus, OH - BoMa *
04-07 Cleveland, OH - House of Blues *
04-08 Indianapolis, IN - The Vogue *
04-09 Detroit, MI - The Fillmore *
04-10 Chicago, IL - Metro *
04-11 Minneapolis, MN - First Avenue *
04-13 Denver, CO - Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom *
04-15 Reno, NV - Knitting Factory *
04-16 San Francisco, CA - The Mezzanine *
04-17 Indio, CA - Coachella

* with Rusko

Musical is going to be more than a tribute show, claims Judy Craymer

A stage production based on the Spice Girls and their music is being created by Mamma Mia! producer Judy Craymer for London's West End, music mogul Simon Fuller says.

Lavender Diamond frontwoman and Decemberists collaborator Becky Stark is the brain behind "Califunya", a new web variety show that features music and unbelievably twee comedy.

The short webisodes appear every other Tuesday morning on the website of advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy, with the first three episodes up now.

According to a press release, "Califunya" "parodies a high school play that is parodying a kids' show from the 60s as performed by grown-ups -- with all the expected exclamation points muted." Basically, it features Stark and her friends acting as childlike as possible.

Singer-songwriters Mia Doi Todd and Ariana Delawari both make regular appearances, and Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy shows up in episode two, briefly guesting on a song about a bluebird. TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe will also appear on the show in the future.

On Tuesday, M.I.A. posted a video for what looked and sounded like a brand new M.I.A. song. And guess what? It is a brand new M.I.A. song called "Space Odyssey" that's to be included on her forthcoming album due out this summer, according to her label, Interscope. (Watch the video after the jump.)

The dubby track was produced by M.I.A. and hot-shit UK beatmaker Rusko on Monday night. The track was apparently inspired by a recent Sri Lanka travel story in The New York Times that M.I.A. did not care for very much.

Ladies licking tar? A boy hiding under a skirt? Hunters in the woods? That'll be the latest crop of clips promoting albums

Two weeks into the New Year and the music business is yet to lumber into life and start churning out new releases. January, though, appears to be the perfect time to start dropping some big hints about the year's forthcoming albums and prompt that most desirable and inexpensive of all marketing campaigns â€' the "online buzz".

What's notable about this new spree of virals is that they all seem to be more sophisticated than your typical clip of music and a web address, building an atmosphere around an album without risking you being bored by the time it hits the shelves.

Take Liars, who launched the campaign for their forthcoming LP, Sisterworld, with a slow drip-drip-drip of information. The promotional push began last November with a website populated by videos of beaches and woods shot in spindly stop-frame, followed by brief clips of the band hunting in thick undergrowth to the chirrup of cicadas. But by the time the first teaser track, Scissor, went viral, you already knew this album was going to feature spooky, backwoods weirdness.

MIA is back, too. At least we think so â€' there's been no official announcement on her new album, but the other day she posted this four-minute video clip of a new track to her Twitter with the title "THERES SPACE FOR...

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She promised an album free of gimmicks. Then she went and posted this cryptic new track on Twitter

Just yesterday, we reported that MIA's new album would be "odd", "musical" and free of "gimmicks". No sooner had the ink dried on the, er, screen, than she posted this ghostly new song, with accompanying vid.

Earlier this afternoon, M.I.A. posted this video on her Twitter with the words "THERES SPACE FOR OL DAT I SEE". In the video, we see M.I.A. (or someone who looks and sounds exactly like M.I.A.) singing while a kaleidoscopic green light throws different patterns of dots on her. The logo for N.E.E.T., M.I.A.'s label, also comes up at the end, and "there's space for all that I see" seems to be a lyric in the chorus, so maybe it's the song's title.

So what is this video? We haven't been able to confirm that it's a song from the new album that M.I.A.'s been talking about lately, but it definitely seems like a very good possibility. Watch it below, via the Fader: